Deeplinks Blog posts about NSA Spying

A bipartisan coalition of 38 civil liberties and public interest organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sent a letter to Congress yesterday that draws a line in the sand on NSA reform. The coalition made it clear that it cannot support the watered-down version of the USA FREEDOM Act passed in the House of Representatives without significant changes to the legislation, and outlined clear steps that Congress can take to address problems with the bill.

Today, the US House of Representatives passed an amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill designed to cut funding for NSA backdoors. The amendment passed overwhelmingly with strong bipartisan support: 293 ayes, 123 nays, and 1 present.

Currently, the NSA collects emails, browsing and chat history under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, and searches this information without a warrant for the communications of Americans—a practice known as "backdoor searches." The amendment would block the NSA from using any of its funding from this Defense Appropriations Bill to conduct such warrantless searches. In addition, the amendment would prohibit the NSA from using its budget to mandate or request that private companies and organizations add backdoors to the encryption standards that are meant to keep you safe on the web.

Update: The US House voted overwhelmingly to approve the amendment during a late night session on Thursday, June 19. For EFF's statement on the passage of the amendment click here.

The NSA may seem like an intimidating giant, but it has a serious Achilles' heel— the enormous budget it claims from taxpayer dollars every year. While change to the actual words of the laws that govern NSA surveillance seems to be a difficult task, a group of representatives have decided to take the battle to the bank.

One of the most unnerving things about modern communications technology is the way devices constantly leak information about their physical whereabouts—to mobile carriers, network operators, e-mail providers, web sites, governments, even shopping mall owners. Many of these information leakages are simple historical accidents. The designers of technologies never considered that technical standards would let everyone around you notice your device's presence. They never considered that technical choices would let web sites infer when two people are (or aren't) spending the night in the same residence, or let your phone company follow you around virtually from moment to moment.

There has been plenty of bad news when it comes to NSA spying, so it’s encouraging when the news is good. At the end of May, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology signaled the beginning of the end for NSA’s effort to undermine encryption, passing an amendment that extricates the NSA from the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) work on encryption standards.

In September of last year, ProPublica, the Guardian, and the New York Times broke the story that the NSA had systematically “circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling” that protects the Internet, “collaborating with technology companies in the United States and abroad to build entry points into their products.”